


Savage Land

by fmo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, apparent character death but nobody actually dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-19 03:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3595362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve wakes up in a strange place: a desert with tall, thin trees, and thin shreds of cloud, and a burnt sienna sky. </p><p>He knows he has to look for Bucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Savage Land

Steve is . . . a little confused.

He’s in a desert, or some kind of sparse, dried-out forest. It doesn’t look like anywhere in Europe, but . . . he was in Europe, right? Or—no, he was with . . . Natasha . . . in . . . ?

But where are the Howlies? They’re supposed to be with him, but when he spins around quickly to look at the surrounding landscape he sees that he’s all alone. And then he realizes: _Where’s Bucky_? The thought clenches at his heart. Where is Bucky, where’s Bucky, where is he? He’s supposed to be right here.

What has Steve done? He can’t remember, but he feels a little sick. It might be his anemia, or his sensitive stomach, or even that bug he thought he shook off . . . when? But that doesn’t matter. He has to find Bucky.

Tall, thin trees waver in a breeze he can’t quite feel. He wants to sit down, but he knows he has to keep going. “Bucky!” he calls as he picks a direction and strides forward. “Buck!”

The dry wind scorches his throat, but he keeps going because he knows he can’t stop. Not this time. “Bucky!” he calls.

Trees. Orange sky, barred with clouds. Dry earth under his feet, which ache, but he carries on.

“Bucky!”

Until, at last, he gets the feeling he should turn. He always got that feeling when Bucky was up high somewhere, watching his back; he always knew when Bucky was watching over him, and he knows it now.

He turns, and Bucky is there. But it’s hard to see Bucky; maybe it’s Steve’s bad eyes getting tired, or maybe it’s the haze of dust. He can’t see Bucky so well, but when he says, “Bucky,” again, Bucky’s shape comes nearer to him and Bucky’s arm goes around him.

“Where were you?” he says, trying for bravado as he slaps Bucky on the back. “You got me looking for hours.” He isn’t really sure how long it was, but it felt at least that long—maybe even days.

“Sorry,” says Bucky’s rough, warm voice in his ear, and Steve lets himself hold on to Bucky for a few minutes longer before letting go.

“You okay?” Steve says to Bucky, hand on his arm. He still can’t quite tell, but he thinks Bucky has that cut on his cheek still. He’ll have to put some iodine on it as soon as he can.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “You?”

“Fine,” Steve says. He surveys the landscape again, this time with Bucky by his side. “Where are the others?”

Bucky stands a little closer to Steve’s shoulder, and then says, “I don’t know.”

But there’s a thin little curving cloud in the umber sky, not like the other thin, level clouds. “You see that?” Steve says. “Looks like the trail that Iron Man leaves, doesn’t it? It’s going that way.” He points. It’s hard to tell compass points without being able to see the sun clearly, but it’s sort of to the right of the route he’s taken so far.

“Okay,” Bucky says, so they follow it.

It’s more and more hours of trudging through the dust and following the cloud trail, and Steve’s actually surprised that his back hasn’t started to hurt, but maybe it’s because Bucky’s with him now. It’s not so bad now, the walking.

Finally, they find the bright-shining red-and-gold Iron Man standing on an empty vista, having an argument with a teenage girl. The girl has curly red hair, and when she turns Steve realizes in surprise that it’s Natasha.

Iron Man turns with her and then says, with shock in his mechanical voice: “Rogers, is that you?”

“It’s me,” Steve says, putting his hand on Bucky’s back. “Natasha? Stark?”

“It’s us,” Natasha says. She’s wearing combat-type heavy clothes and boots, but her hair is long. Then she says, carefully, “Barnes?”

“Yeah,” Bucky manages, after a minute.

Natasha just nods and says, “Stark’s been surveying the territory, trying to find the others, including you. But his reactor’s running low, so flying’s getting difficult.”

“I saw Wilson on that last trip,” Stark says. “On his wings, you know? But when I got to him, he was . . . the closer I got to him, the farther away he was.”

“Which way?” Steve says. When Stark points, that’s the direction they go—as a group, this time. Steve leads, with Bucky at his side. Natasha and Stark are behind—his heavy mechanical steps in the sand, hers as light as air.

It takes much less time, this time. It’s Bucky who spots Sam first, and he points him out to Steve, saying, “There.” Soon enough, Sam is standing and waving to them. Stark was right: he has his wings on, but he’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt, not his tactical gear. There’s also a teenage boy next to Sam—one with sandy hair, who jumps up when he sees Natasha. Given that he also has a bow and arrows, Steve guesses that this is Clint, although the boy is so much younger than the Clint he knows that it’s hard to tell. And the bow and arrows are brightly colored, not the military-looking gear Steve’s seen Clint use in the past.

“Look who I found,” Sam says, gesturing to Clint when they draw near enough to talk, and then Steve embraces him too. It’s another worry off his mind to know that Sam is all right. “And look at you,” Sam says to Steve, stepping back. “No shield?”

Natasha and Clint are having some kind of silent reunion of their own, which the rest of them intentionally ignore. Instead Steve says, “What do you mean?”

Sam looks a little worried and says, “You don’t remember your shield?”

Steve remembers his shield, of course. He shakes his head. “Just don’t have it with me,” he says.

“S’all right,” Bucky says, speaking up for the first time. He lifts his hand. “I have this.” What he has in his hand is a rifle.

Bucky means to reassure him by saying so, but instead Steve feels a knot in his stomach. “You don’t have to have that,” he says, putting his hand over Bucky’s.

“Steve,” Natasha says. The group turns toward her. “What’s our mission?”

“We have to find Bruce,” Stark says at once. “And Rhodey.”

“Rhodes wasn’t with us,” Sam says.

The Iron Man face is implacable, but Stark seems unsettled. “I want to find him,” he insists.

“Sam’s right,” Clint chips in. “Rhodes wasn’t with us.”

When Steve thinks about it, that seems right. Rhodes is sometimes with them but he—wasn’t this time? His head aches.

“He was in California,” Natasha says slowly, as though the recollection is just forming as she speaks.

“And where were we?” Stark says. It’s glib, like everything Stark says, but it cuts off the flow of the conversation like a knife in a man’s throat. Steve doesn’t know where they were. And nobody else says anything, so he’s willing to bet that nobody else knows either.

They were in Italy, Steve thinks. No, it was London. DC. They were in a big theater in Tennessee—in a hospital room in—on a mountain—

He reaches for Bucky, and Bucky’s arm goes around his shoulders. The cut’s still there on Bucky’s cheek, but now the mask is there too, over his nose and mouth. Steve reaches up and pulls it off again, throws it in the dust. “Thanks,” Bucky says, very quietly.

“Wait, so none of us knows where we were?” Stark is saying in strident tones. “And JARVIS isn’t here. This is great.”

“First objective is to find Banner,” Natasha says steadily. “Then we try to contact base.”

“Agreed,” Steve says. “Sam, did you see Banner when you were flying around at all?”

“No, but I can go up again,” Sam says, stepping back to open his wings. “I came down when I spotted Barton.”

“Can you make some broad loops above us as we walk?” Steve asks. Sam nods and takes flight, and then Steve leads the team onwards, away from the territory they’ve already traveled. He has no idea if this is the right direction, but it’s better than just sitting and waiting. They have to do _something_.

They walk on, this time with Steve and Bucky at the head of the group, Stark in the middle, and Clint and Natasha making up the rear. Stark is uncharacteristically silent, other than occasionally making attempts to contact JARVIS through his suit.

The breeze is cold, Steve thinks. That’s partly because he’s wearing his tan jacket, the one that never was very warm; he misses his leather jacket. But, also, the scattered, bare trees do little to shield them from the breeze, and he remembers knowing that desert climates get cold at night. But it’s hard to tell whether night is coming or not. The sky is still sienna in color, still striped with scraps of cloud but revealing no sun.

Sam drops down to report no sign of other life, and Steve tells him to take a rest for now. They’re all tired from walking, so they need to find a sheltered place to make camp—whether night really is coming or not. There’s a few rocks a little way onward, according to Sam, that would make better shelter than nothing, so they head on that way—until, with no warning, Stark falls to his knees.

“It’s nothing—nothing,” Stark says, metal hand pressed to his metal chest, but when they look, they see that the arc reactor is flickering.

“I thought you fixed that,” Natasha says.

“Don’t you want to take the suit off?” Sam says.

“It’s never fixed,” Tony says, falling gracelessly into the dirt. They push him onto his back, splayed-out in the armor. Steve has a terrible sense of déjà vu.

“Stark, what can we do?” Steve asks, kneeling by him, but there’s no room for Stark to reply. As soon as Steve’s said the words, Stark disappears. He’s gone.

At once, Natasha and Bucky both put their hands to their backs and turn to look outwards from the group. In Natasha’s hand, there’s now a pistol; in Bucky’s, the rifle again. 

“Oh, my god,” Sam says, looking at Steve.

There’s nothing left of Stark, and Steve has no explanation. And that’s too familiar a feeling.  Steve wishes he had his shield.

“We still need to get to the shelter,” he says, standing up. He can see the tall rocks Sam mentioned. “Should only be about five minutes more. There’s a little more protection there.”

Hawkeye pulls an arrow out, too, and keeps it in his hand. His bow isn’t colorful any more, Steve notices.

There’s nothing to leave to mark the place where Stark was; all they can do is keep walking, so they do. When they finally make it to the tall rocks, Sam and Natasha start weighing the benefits of trying to make a fire. All Steve can think about is keeping his hand on Bucky. He can’t lose him, not again.

So nobody really notices Clint until Bucky goes tense and says, “His eyes.”

Clint’s eyes are filming over with blue, like blue fire burning in them. He drops his bow, reaches out and says, “Tasha,” and then—he’s gone too.

Natasha puts her hands in the dirt where Clint was. “Where are they going?” she says. Her hair is long, falling over her shoulder onto the dusty ground.

Sam looks at Steve, but when Steve can offer nothing, Sam says, “I don’t know.”

Bucky’s grip is tight, tight on Steve’s shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere,” Steve promises him. But his chest is tight too, and he recognizes the burning there. If he had had his shield, this wouldn’t have happened, he thinks.

“Steve,” Bucky pleads, holding onto his arm with a grip like a vise. “Please don’t—please—“

Steve doesn’t want to.

But he closes his eyes.

When he opens them, they’re gummy, like he’s been asleep too long. His uniform is pleasantly thick and warm, even though his face is cold. The air is still cold, but now it’s chilly in a damp way, as though he’s underground. He _is_ underground.

He sits up. He’s on the floor, but now it’s a gritty concrete floor. This is the basement in Minneapolis where—it was a HYDRA facility, they went together and then they went underground and then—

“Okay, breathe,” says Bruce Banner, putting a steadying hand on Steve’s shoulder.

“I’m okay,” Steve says. He takes in a deep breath and takes stock. Minneapolis. Basement under factory. HYDRA weapons, Stark complaining about magic symbols, a big glow coming out of some shiny ring. Boy, Steve does not want to see any more shiny cubes, gems, or other glowing objects ever again. It’s all trouble.

“—halfway through my niece’s wedding,” James Rhodes is saying somewhere to his left. “I’d say you owe me three free upgrades for this one.”

“Technically, not my fault,” Stark’s voice, free of electronic effects, replies swiftly. “Technically, Avengers business, defeating Nazis and so on, so this totally goes in the ‘hero’ category.”

Sitting on the edge of a lab table nearby, Clint Barton gives him a weary wave.

“How’d you wake us up?” Steve asks Banner. “Didn’t it hit you too?”

Banner gives that wry shrug of his and says, “I went green a little, so I didn’t go to sleep. When I got better, I called Rhodes and Hill for backup. Fortunately, there’s a guy who was on SHIELD’s radar who knew how to help.”

Steve takes this in and says, “I’m all right. You can go wake up the others.”

“They’re coming on their own,” Banner says. Just at that moment, Clint crouches down to the floor to murmur to a stirring Natasha. Steve sees Maria offering a steadying hand to Sam, who is rubbing his forehead as he sits up.

That makes up all the Avengers they brought. But—

“Over in the corner. He was following you, was on the upper level and got hit,” Bruce says quietly, and then wanders off.

Steve goes to the corner Bruce had indicated. Behind another lab bench, with his head resting on someone’s rolled-up jacket, Bucky is still sleeping. His hair is still long, but has been pushed back from his face—it looks like he’s been wearing a baseball cap over it. The hat’s next to him now. Otherwise, he has a little stubble and is wearing a denim jacket and jeans. His face still looks so tired, but it’s not the face of torment Steve remembers.

“Bucky,” Steve says softly, dropping to his knees next to his friend.

Bucky’s eyes open.

“I’m here,” Steve says. As much as he wants to touch Bucky, he doesn’t. Sam's always told him that even for vets with ordinary nightmares, it's better not to touch as they wake up. And Steve hopes, but he doesn't know how much of the Bucky from the dream will wake up to see him now.

Bucky sits up fast and then just looks at Steve: wide, torn, wanting eyes, not the Winter Soldier's eyes.

“You died,” Bucky says, sounding like he’s going to choke. “You died.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says desperately. He hates to hear that sound in Bucky's voice; he knows how he would feel if he was in Bucky's place and had to watch what Bucky just saw. “It was a dream. It wasn’t real. I’m here now, you found me, and we’re all right. We’re gonna be all right.”

Bucky swallows and says, “You were small.”

“Always am, in my dreams,” Steve tells him. It’s a secret he’s never confided to anyone else, but he'll give it to Bucky freely. “And you watched my back, like you always do,” he says, because the years without Bucky feel like a bad dream now. 

Bucky looks behind Steve, toward the others. Steve can hear conversation, and any minute now someone is going to come over. “What now?” Bucky asks.

“Anything,” Steve says. “But I hope you’ll let me come along for the ride.” 

There’s something softer in Bucky’s eyes then. “Sure you want to?” he says.

“I’m sure,” Steve says, reaching a hand toward Bucky. After a moment, Bucky takes it and curls his fingers around Steve’s.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, damn. I have heaps of stuff to do but instead I wrote a fic. Oops. Yes, this fic title is a reference to the Marvel Savage Land, but this isn't actually the Savage Land. I guess it's just an in-joke/red herring.
> 
> Please leave comments!
> 
> Come say hi to me at fmowrites.tumblr.com. If you have found this fic through a rec, please let me know!


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